Forum:Merger proposal
:(Pawel's message reproduced from my talk page — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:51, June 30, 2010 (UTC)) Hi, I'm Paweł from the Wikia Gaming Team, and I'd like to congratulate you on doing a great job on the Civilization wiki. I would also like to discuss a possible merger of Wikia's Civilization wikis (civ4.wikia.com, civ5.wikia.com and civilization.wikia.com) into one. Currently, the Civ4 and Civ5 wikis are great sources of info on the latest games in the series, while the general Civilization wiki covers the whole series but is not as detailed, and I think merging them into one, definitive resource about the whole series would be a good idea. We have recently merged a newly created wiki about Red Dead Redemption with an older one about Red Dead Revolver to create a highly successful Red Dead Wiki. ... Like with Red Dead Wiki, we'd also gladly help with designing a brand new skin for the wiki. I think it would be best if the main page here became focused mainly on the upcoming Civilization V, with portals dedicated to each of the other major Civilization games working as starting pages for exploring each of them. Of course such a merger would require many pages to be disambiguated instead of using unambiguous names like they do now, but we would of course help with moving all the pages that would require such a move to new names, adjusting links etc. Wikis for games like Fallout, Red Dead and Dragon Age also have been using the blog extension for news, which allows for posting news comments etc, and I think Civilization would also benefit from using one, as the wiki would become more attractive as a news source. If you have any questions and concerns about the proposal, please let me know. Ausir(talk) 20:34, June 29, 2010 (UTC) :I was a little sad when an enthusiast decided that Civ4 needed its own wiki. I'd be happy to see them back in the fold, though there is a risk that you would lose some one-game specialists. My only query about your proposal is "such a merger would require many pages to be disambiguated instead of using unambiguous names like they do now". I don't understand that. At present we have pages such as "Archer" that say a little about what archers do in each game and may (though most at present don't) link to more specific pages for each game. That should continue, as I think I discussed on a recent forum page. Please clarify with an example of specific pages that you think should be renamed or substituted. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:51, June 30, 2010 (UTC) I agree wholeheartedly with a merging of all the Civilization wikis. There isn't a need for 3 different wikias for the same game series. If a game is too big to be on a wiki, like Final Fantasy XI wiki, then by all means, let it have its own wiki, but neither Civ 4 or Civ 5 deserve it's own wiki, because of my knowledge, it isn't big enough to deserve it's own wiki. The Yoshiman 97 02:59, June 30, 2010 (UTC) :Hello there. I was made a bureaucrat at the Civ4 wiki a long time ago and recently I founded the Civ5 wiki. I'd also be for merging as the German general Civ wiki at http://www.civwiki.de/ seems to be working well. However, the merge has to be done properly. To me it seems like a good idea to even create separate namespaces for all the different games in the series. Currently the Civ4 wiki has more articles than this wiki (isn't big enough, Yoshiman, huh?) and they are more structured and nicer looking than here. I'd hate to see them getting all messed up with information about the same entities in the different incarnations of the game. Also, the merge has to be automatical, no one is going to make the imports and exports manually. —ZeroOne (talk / ) 22:04, June 30, 2010 (UTC) ::Although it's generally up to you guys, I'm personally not a fan of using separate namespaces for each game in the long run (it requires more piped links than are really necessary and requires constant creation of new namespaces for each new game), but importing all Civ4 wiki articles in a separate namespace is probably the easiest way to do this initially , even if they are later to be moved to the main namespace, either to be merged or disambiguated with existing articles, or to replace them. I also think that with the level of detail in the Civ4 articles, it's better for them to be left as separate articles, rather than to be merged into long articles listing each unit's stats in each game. Perhaps a good solution would be something akin to the overview pages at The Vault (Fallout Wiki), like plasma rifle? Each such article gives more detail than simple disambiguation pages, but leaves actual gameplay stats for separate pages for each game, properly disambiguated. ::If everyone agrees, we can start the import, with articles imported from the Civ4 wiki being put in the Civilization IV: namespace. Ausir(talk) 00:20, July 2, 2010 (UTC) :::I'd like Ausir to fix the plasma rifle link and to answer my request about the meaning of "such a merger would require many pages to be disambiguated". But I fully agree that there should not be merger of "more specific pages for each game" with the "overview pages" we already have (mentioned in my reply above), such as Settlers. The overviews should link to each game-specific page, and there would be more such links on those overview pages if we had more of the game-specific pages. However, while I agree with ZeroOne on every other point above, I wonder whether we need separate namespaces, even initially. How about "pseudo-namespaces", as on the Towns, Villages and Cities Wiki? Game prefix followed by a colon, so that links to other articles in the group can be piped very simply, e.g. Civilization IV:Archer looks like "Archer" in the text (which is what you want in articles that are purely about Civilization IV) but links to a main namespace article Civilization IV:Archer . We have only half a dozen "Civilization IV:" articles at present, so an import would need very little preparation. But for less future typing, the prefix could be "Civ4:" instead. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:01, July 2, 2010 (UTC) ::::Plasma rifle link is fixed now. As for disambiguation, I mean that given some article name clashes (see: User:Angela/merge), some articles would at least need to be disambiguated now. But anyway it's best to give them a temporary namespace. By the way, I think it would be best to look through the list of articles from Civ4 that clash with existing articles here, and delete those here that are just Civilization 4-only stubs with less content than the Civ4 wiki ones, to make way for these. Ausir(talk) 18:35, July 2, 2010 (UTC) I'd also like to point out that the Civ4 wiki makes extensive use of templates. For example, the unit template automatically finds an unit image based on the page name. So in this sense it would be better to create a pseudo-namespace (an article named "Civ4:Warrior" in the main namespace) or to follow the current standard with parenthesis ("Warrior (Civ4)"). Otherwise finding the images automatically would be rather difficult as you cannot have a file in two namespaces simultaneously (think of something like "Civ4:Image:Warrior.jpg") In the long run I think that every game in the series needs standardized templates for civs, units, resources, etc. Maybe they could be named , , etc. Importing the templates from the Civ4 wiki would of course use up the non-prefixed template names such as "unit", "civ", etc. but they could then be moved under the new names little by little. —ZeroOne (talk / ) 17:38, July 3, 2010 (UTC) :The unit template will work regardless if the page is at Warrior or Civilization IV:Warrior. does not take the namespace into consideration. It will have to be fixed manually for those that will be moved to e.g. Warrior (Civilization IV) eventually, though. ::Yeah, but if the page is called Civilization IV:Warrior, the template will get confused at Civilization III:Warrior because for both cases it will be looking for Warrior.jpg even though there should be different images for the warriors of different games. —ZeroOne (talk / ) 08:46, July 12, 2010 (UTC) :::Well, for now only Civ4 units have this template, so Civ4 images can be the default, while if Civ3 is specified as the game the template is used for, it will search for File:Warrior (Civ3).jpg. Ausir(talk) 20:10, July 14, 2010 (UTC) :Anyway, does anyone (Robert?) object to deleting overlapping Civ4-only articles here to make way for the more details Civ4 wiki ones (this will make the merger a bit easier and these are obsolete anyway)? Ausir(talk) 22:14, July 5, 2010 (UTC) ::I've no problem with deleting Civ4-only articles here as noted above. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:40, July 7, 2010 (UTC) ::I don't approve of overwriting redirects, as seems to be proposed on User:Angela/merge. Many of the redirects were the way to reduce duplication and confusion, e.g. people writing separate articles about Rome, Roman, and Romans, Greece, Greek, and Greeks. We agreed to consolidate on the adjectival form of the civilization. Redirects followed. Overwriting those redirects with new articles would just create another set of duplicates without links between related articles. Definitely separate namespace or pseudo-namespace wanted there (as Ausir said: "importing all Civ4 wiki articles in a separate namespace is probably the easiest way to do this initially"), so that we can all see what we have got before discussing whether that consolidation was the best or whether we would be better with a different system. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:40, July 7, 2010 (UTC) :Well, anyone likely to be really interested has had 10 days' notice of this discussion (since I alerted every recent contributor and most of the long-inactive bigger contributors). I'd be happy to see a detailed plan of action (which may involve some amendment to User:Angela/merge) as discussed in my previous post. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:00, July 10, 2010 (UTC) :Progress. All seems to have been quite smooth. Now see Forum:Civ5 material to be merged for what we should do manually (including some naming conventions that may need to be freshly agreed). The similar job for Civ4 might be better done with a bot and can wait until we see how Civ5 goes. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:32, August 18, 2010 (UTC)